It was inevitable that in Iran the US would be blamed for the deaths of president Ebrahim Raisi and foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian. In a country that thrives on conspiracy theories. US sanctions were responsible for the country’s failure to upgrade its aircraft, and thus , according to some, for the crash .
The helicopter, a Bell 212, reportedly purchased by the ousted Pahlavi dynasty in the 1970s, was bringing both men back from a dam opening ceremony in neighbouring Azerbaijan across mountains shrouded in fog. Nothing suggests the crash was anything but an accident, a “technical failure” according to Iranian state radio.
Raisi’s death, at a time of turmoil in the Middle East, will shock the hardline regime in Tehran, but is unlikely to result in any significant change of course either domestically or internationally. Elected in 2021 on a record-low turnout from a field that had seen all real challengers to the ideological hardliners purged, Raisi was always closer to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (85), the real power in the land, than several of his predecessors. The president has little control of strategic decisions but runs the executive and the economy.
An expert in Islamic law and senior member of the judiciary who was close to the powerful Revolutionary Guards, his reputation was as a ruthless enforcer of religious orthodoxy, involved in the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988, and as a Khamenei loyalist widely tipped to succeed the aging leader.
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Khamenei has already nominated his first vice-president, Mohammad Mokhber, as interim leader ahead of elections within 50 days. But, with the ayatollah in declining health, the election is likely to become a forum for a closed internecine conflict among conservatives over the succession. The regime is again unlikely to allow critics to contest the election, although disqualifications by the “Guardian Council” have recently been publicly challenged by former reformist president Hassan Rouhani. Little more, however, than straws in the wind for this entrenched regime.